


The Green Witch

by AshVee



Series: The Green Witch Saga [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Depression, Fix It Fic, Gen, Magical Hijinx, Suicide Attempt, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-07
Updated: 2017-02-07
Packaged: 2018-09-22 18:09:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9619106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshVee/pseuds/AshVee
Summary: Stiles Stilinski hasn't felt the rush of adrenaline in his veins in years. Derek Hale hasn't known anything but the wolf in just as long. A Green Witch, a woman of the forest asks them a question: What if I offered you a way to change that? To take that guilt festering in your soul and use it to correct your mistakes? What price would you pay, wolf, to know the feel of a pack again?They answer: Anything. All.





	1. The Green Witch

**Author's Note:**

> This is a bit of a time-travel fix it fic that may or may not be the start of a series of 1-5 chapter pieces. It'll depend on the response. They also will not be posted until completed, and all chapters will be posted at once (like this one).

Stiles leaned back against his car, a little four door sedan with less character than a Kristen Stewart role portrayal. It was a necessary evil. He’d grown up, and it was time he had a car to match. Vaguely gold and nondescript, it fit right into the office-and wasn’t that a kick in the teeth? Stiles working in an office-where the Jeep had gotten him whispers about clinging to his childhood. 

“Good morning, Mr. Stilinski.” 

Stiles glanced over at the woman getting out of her car. A secretary at his firm, and a kind woman, she had little more to her name than her smiles. He’d tried for two years to get her to call him Stiles.

“Great; and yourself, Kathleen?” He called her Kathleen because she hated the name almost as much as he hated being called Mr. Stilinski. 

“How many times am I going to have to ask you to call me Cathy?” she asked, smile never fading. 

“At least once more, Miss Kathleen,” he said, bowing mockingly. She wouldn’t understand the reference. No one at the office ever got his little snipes and jokes. 

“Oh, you,” she said, shaking her head at him as though he was an incorrigible youth that had accidentally broken her flower pot. 

“I’ll see you inside,” he called after her as she walked toward the little brick building. 

Alone in the lot, he threw his head back and heaved a sigh into the spring air, quelling the part of him that screamed this wasn’t his life. He checked the buttons on his suit coat-both at the wrists and of his undershirt-before heading toward the office. The last time he’d forgotten, he’d walked in with his Batman shirt peeking out and a still bandaged cut on his wrist announcing his ongoing depression to the entire firm. 

It wasn’t the most embarrassing moment of his life, but it ranked in the top twenty. 

He went through his day nodding at the appropriate times, smiling when it was expected. The stack of case files in his inbox fell one by one in the finished bin. He’d always been good at research, and as a paralegal, he made the most of the skill. Lost in case files and precedent, he almost didn’t hear when someone called his name. 

“Stilinski, how was the weekend?” Nick Talmond was a stuffy paralegal working his way through law school. Stiles was the closest to Nick’s age, and the kid had leached onto Stiles the second he’d been hired. 

“Like the one before,” Stiles said. “Yours?” 

There was a long pause, and Stiles realized his mistake when he caught Nick looking at him in confusion. 

“Wasn’t it your birthday on Saturday?” 

It wasn’t, but he’d made up the story of being invited to visit old friends back home for his birthday...which was really on Thursday, but if he’d admitted to that, Nick would have insisted on drinks before he supposedly left. 

“Yeah,” Stiles said, coming up with a lie on the run. It was almost too easy to lie to humans after you’d learned to lie to a werewolf. “We rescheduled for next weekend.” 

What he didn’t saw was he had no one to reschedule with. His father had died two years after his high school graduation. Stiles had run and not looked back. There wasn’t much to look back to. 

Scott hadn’t reached out since that day in the rain, when they realized exactly how different they were. Lydia was saving the world while balancing a whirlwind romance with an Italian man twice her age. Isaac disappeared not long after Stiles, thought Stiles found him a few months later, in a small town in the middle of nowhere. He was married to a bottle now. 

Kira moved on, traveling with her parents, and Stiles didn’t much care where she went, if he was honest. The girl came into their lives, soaked into the space where Allison had been - a space Stiles felt should have remained empty far longer than it did. 

In a more shocking turn of events, it was Jackson Whitmore that Stiles spoke with more than the rest. He’d gone back to Beacon Hills a few years ago, a full fledged lawyers and the CEO of his father’s business. 

From time to time Stiles did researched, worked a little of his internet mojo, and did Jackson a favor. In exchange, Jackson stopped by the Beacon Hills house and made sure the kid Stiles was paying to mow the lawn did a good job. Once or twice, Jackson had offered Stiles a position as his own paralegal, but Stiles couldn’t have stomached going back to Beacon Hills, let alone working for Jackson. 

“Hey man,” Nick said, startling Stiles from his reading. 

“Hm?” he asked, only half listening. 

“We could go out tonight? Do a little post-birthday celebrating?” Stiles glanced up at Nick, who looked so bad for him that Stiles just have him a smile and shook his head. 

“I’m planning on heading back home tonight,” he said. The words were out past his lips before they knew they were true. “I’ve got some vacation time accrued, and I think it’s time I went home.”

Nick didn’t call him a liar, not in the way Scott or Isaac, or even Derek, would have. He just fixed Stiles with big, brown eyes and nodded. It was as damning as anything any werewolf could have done.

Hours later, in the boring gold four-door, he caught the expressway headed west. The sun set over the horizon in the windshield, and he couldn’t help but think about how symbolic it was, if the world was trying to encourage him along. 

There was nothing more fitting to an end than a sunset. 

It could, he supposed, be winter.

-Chapter One: The Green Witch-

Derek hadn’t walked on a human’s feet in years. The cold of a winter night, the rush of adrenaline before bringing down a kill, of knowing he survived on his will alone...well, that was as free as he was ever going to get in this world.

The wolf was a feral thing, made of sinew and bone instead of pain and longing, and that was exactly the way Derek himself wanted to be for the rest of his life. He wanted to hunt and be hunted, to give chase and be stalked, to live and die.

Mostly, he wanted to die. 

Mostly. 

Some days he just wanted to see Cora, curled up on a couch, glaring at him over the edge of a book, music echoing despite the earphones. Others, he wanted the feel of Peter’s stare on his back, of knowing the older Hale had done what was needed in the before. Once even, he wanted Laura looking at him with barely concealed blame in her eyes. He wanted all those things, and he would never know them again. 

It was easier to want to be dead. So, he did. 

He swam rivers instead of fjording them. He brought down the largest buck he could find instead of taking the sickly doe. He ran under treestands during hunting season, and once, when the urge for the weight of those stares became too much, he stood out in the middle of a blacktop highway in the dark and stared down a pair of oncoming headlights. 

It didn’t matter so much what Derek wanted, because the wolf had wants, too. The wolf wanted to eat meat, to lap warm blood off frost covered ground, to run and live and die by the promise of wild things. 

The strong survive. The weak become food. It was as simple a thing as had ever been, and the wolf was nothing if not strong. 

There were times, in the small hours before sunrise, that the wolf wanted other things. Warm fur against his own. Pups playing underfoot. Pack, close and whole and safe. Derek hadn’t had a pack since he left his last one to chase his first one. 

Cora ran from him, disappearing into the desert where Maliha had grown, the pair of them starting their own pack. They hadn’t needed-hadn’t wanted him. Peter had disappeared not long after, though Derek didn’t know to where. 

Derek spent a handful of weeks as a human after Peter left. He was the man with green eyes and a sharp jaw working as a Sheriff’s Deputy for the man that replaced John Stilinski. In the end, one full moon, he slipped into the full shift, and in the morning, he’d simply not changed back. 

He ran the woods of his homeland, his territory, alone. Nightmares kept him awake most nights. His family had left him, and he’d run after. In his absence, his pack - the one he’d made - fractured. It was those thoughts that often haunted his night as he ran perimeters and stalked through shadows. 

Scott was gone - a self declared True Alpha that had done nothing but tear down the strong around him to bolster the weak. He broke Derek’s pack and sent the splinters ricocheting through the world. Derek had looked for them. 

Isaac held those shards, cutting into his bone and past, down to the soul of him. Derek had been in no state to help anyone, and so he let him go, let him disappear into whatever he needed to survive. Afterall, Derek needed the wolf’s fur.

Lydia had never needed any of them, not really, and in the devastation of a shattered pack, she’d realized she wanted them. That desire scared her, and she’d run. She called it traveling, but Derek was a master of running away from his fears. He recognized the signs better than anyone.

The last of his pack - his pack, not Scott’s - he’d been unable to find. Stiles was gone when Derek returned, and his scent had long ago faded to a lingering memory in the places Stiles favored the most.

So, Derek was the wolf, because the wolf could live alone far better than the human.

He lapped smooth stream water, pleased with the crisp chill. Even in Southern California, spring time ground water was cool. Across the stream, a narrow rock outcropping called to him, and he eyed it with curiosity. He might make the jump, or he might slip off into the shallow water below. 

He sized the distance, and leaped. The wolf’s muscles tensed and relaxed, the feeling of power and accomplishment pleasing it as it landed on the other side.

_What does a sniveling, hiding thing know of strength?_

The question vibrated in his head, filling up every last corner and bringing him to the ground on his belly. He panted against the loud, echoing way it seemed to take all that he was and tear through it to the truth of him. A low, whining sound escaped his throat, and he flattened his ears. 

_Does the half-wolf not like the power of my voice?_

It was less loud this time, more controlled. There was still power there, resounding and unchallengeable, like what whisper of memory he had of his mother’s Alpha voice. 

_Who are you?_ He thought he asked the question out loud, but the wolf couldn’t make words. The answer came anyway. 

_I am the Green Witch._

Sharp wolf senses couldn’t find her-for the voice was female. Some part of him knew where she was though, something deep and cloying in his chest, and as he followed it, he found her. 

She was beautiful, even at her age. Her skin, porcelain white and fair, was wrinkled with old age, though just around her lips and the barest whisper at the corners of her eyes. The deep set of her eyelids made her look shadowed and regal, and the snow white hair bound around her head in braids and plaits was spotted with flowers and greenery all the way to where it pooled at her feet. 

He could see no clothing, though she was covered from neck to wrists and ankles in twisting vines and early spring blooms. She was, Derek decided in that moment, the Earth herself. 

_You could call me that, wolf._

_What do you want?_

It was hard, focusing his thoughts enough to make them words, after being so many years without. He found they came clumsier than memory. 

_My power back. It has been so long since wolves ran on my ground and howled at my moon._

She brought up a pale hand, fingers long and graceful, and ran the tips down the side of her face, tracing a long, jagged scar he hadn’t seen before. It was startling now that he looked at it, and he couldn’t help but think she was so very much like the Earth in that moment. The overall thing was beautiful, but when small pieces were studied, the flaws popped out. 

_This one your pack gave to me. The Nemeton was a sore loss, but I was willing to bear it to watch your young wolves grow._

_There won’t be wolves here again._

She looked almost angry at that, with a sad turn of her lips that reminded him of his mother-and oddly enough, Stiles. They both had the same way of looking at people, of sussing them out. That look found all that could be wrong in you but saw that by removing it, irreparable damage would be caused. His mother often looked at him that way. Stiles gave Scott the same consideration more often than Derek could remember. 

_What if I offered you a way to change that? To take that guilt festering in your soul and use it to correct your mistakes? What price would you pay, wolf, to know the feel of a pack again?_

He didn’t plan on answering. Derek, in his mind, wanted none of the promise of hope, none of the pain that came with losing it. The human in him turned from the hauntingly beautiful wood-witch and the flaws that made her so.

The wolf whimpered: 

_Anything._

-Chapter One: The Green Witch-

He didn’t know why he pulled down the familiar gravel road into the Hale preserve. He wanted to delay the inevitable, he supposed. The woods were pretty in the spring, tight green buds just starting to snow and the smell of growing things, of living things, all around him.

His feet took him along an old deer trail, one he’d walked time and time again with Scott when they’d needed someplace to hide, to be, that wasn’t school or home. That had been a long time ago, but Stiles’ body still knew the lay of the land, the subtle way the ground angled this way and that. There was a deep imprint of knowledge engraved into the core of him that never left, no matter how far he ran. 

“There’s no one in these woods anymore,” he muttered, taking care to mind his feet as he stepped over the unearthed root system of a nearby oak. There were rumors, even before he’d left, about the evil living in the old Hale preserve. Some said there was a pack of wolves out there, rabid and wild, waiting to tear into anyone that entered. Others, the more realistic, said the preserve was vast, the landscape treacherous. 

Time was, neither would have been wrong. Now? Well. 

A few - and those were the ones stiles looked at a little too long - said it was the ghosts of the damned, those burned in hell on Earth. There were times in those woods, being chased by some new evil, some greater threat, that he thought maybe those people were right. 

Those times made Stiles wonder: _what if?_

What if-  
-he’d never taken Scott into the woods?   
-he’d never questioned about werewolves?  
-he’d never hauled Derek Hale into the vet’s office?  
-out of the pool?  
-away from danger?

What if he’d never told his father? Would John Stilinski have been out in the woods that day? Would he have known to be just there, in the world place, at the wrong time? 

_What if I offered you a way to change it? To take that guilt festering in your soul and use it to correct your mistakes? What price would you pay, wolf, to know the feel of a pack again?_

The voice startled him. It was clear and high and everything that it wasn’t. It was low gravel and cracking stone. It was water over a dry river bed and the sound of thunder rocking along a canyon. It was lark song and wolf howl all in one. 

And it slipped from the closed lips of the most hideous creature Stiles had ever seen. She was young, terribly so, hauntingly so, sitting in brambles and twisted, thorny vines. Her hair was knotted and snarled in poison ivy and oak.

Her skin was tanned by the sun, tough as tree bark and dusty, as if it had grown out of the Earth. Her eyes were a deep green covered in the sheen of milk that the dead laid claim to. Every bit of her, every scrap of flesh he could see, was littered with scars like splintering shale.

As ugly as she was, her words were pristine, pure and lovely, and they spoke directly into his soul, to the withered, guilty part of him that would pay anything to fix the mistakes he’d made in his life. 

Vaguely, he recognized the black wolf staring at her, but his world was nothing but that woman and her whispered question. The longer his eyes locked on her, the more he saw, the more his view changed. 

Her tanned skin was beautiful in the sunlight, with delicate little freckles and the light played at it with a shimmer. Her lips were full and the color of ripe strawberries as they pressed together despite her voice echoing in him. 

What would he give to change things? 

He whispered in a punched-out half breath: 

_All._


	2. In Another Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know your thoughts!

Stiles didn’t remember walking back to his car, and if pressed, he couldn’t admit to remembering much of anything until he fell into his childhood bed, his limbs heavy with more than fatigue. 

He closed his eyes there, aching in a way he hadn’t in years. 

Her face was waiting for him behind his eyelids, hideous and beautiful all at once. She smiled at him, her teeth shattered alabaster. She said something he couldn’t hear over the ringing in his ears. 

Standing there, she was beauty and grace and everything Stiles could ever love. She’d a wicked smile on her young, full lips even as she spoke to him. 

It was the smile, the knowledge there, that gave him a shot of startled anxiety. Because that smile? He’d seen in the mirror once upon a nightmare. 

-Chapter Two: In Another Time-

Derek ran. 

The wolf was on edge, screaming at him to turn around, to fix what had been broken, to find what had been stolen, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t, the human he didn’t want to be. 

He ran feet and yards and miles until his lungs burned and his heart throbbed and his limbs ached. He didn’t know how far he’d gone, but it couldn’t have been far enough, it would never be far enough. 

He collapsed in a heap, tired beyond memory, in front of the burned out wreck of the Hale house. 

As his tongue lolled and his mind flickered toward unconsciousness, he saw the Green Witch, her beauty peeled away from her, nothing but withering limbs and leather skin, rotting teeth and split finger nails. 

Split, bleeding lips pulled into a smile feral and snarling that was so very familiar his wolf let out a howl of recognition. 

It was the smile of his wolf. 

-Chapter Two: In Another Time-

“Stiles! Come on, kiddo, you’re going to be late for school again!”

The shout startled Stiles awake, and for a split second, he thought he was still dreaming. A familiar, heavy knock struck the door twice, and he stared, mouth ajar. 

“M’up!” The voice to his left was his own, but the high, reedy tone it had been before puberty. He - the younger him - stood from a desk chair and stumbled blindly into the bathroom. 

Stiles watched the door shut, heard the shower cut on. 

“Hurry up!” His father’s voice through the door was a bomb just under his seat. It was potential and danger and everything that Stiles had wanted before he’d gone to sleep. 

Now, he only wanted to throw the door open, cast every bit of his strength and morsel of self-preservation away and hug the man on the other side. Those things though, were not easily shrugged off. They knew danger, they’d kept him alive despite himself. They reminded the rest of him of the pain. 

Pain he couldn’t stand, not again, and so he scrambled from the bed and out the window. 

He’d made fun of Derek for climbing in and out of window. He never really considered where that urge might have come from, that once upon a time there was a reason for using a window instead of a door. He never understood it more than in that moment. 

The landing wasn’t something he was used to anymore. He’d not snuck out of anything but dinner and drinks in years. His bones had forgotten the jarring dead-on sprint of panic, the twist of rolling down an incline only to get up and keep running. 

It didn’t matter; he was going to wake up soon. The safety and happiness of dreams could only last so long when reality was waiting. 

It was as vivid a dream as he’d ever had. The sun was warm against his skin as he walked down the block. The breeze was light and carried with it the sweet, cloying scent of a honey locust. People Stiles recognized from the edge of memory went about their mornings - walking the dog, gathering the mail, morning exercise. 

Old Miss Abrams was easing herself down the sidewalk toward the morning paper, her old joints protesting every step. He watched her only a moment before he jogged over and picked it up for her. Old bones, he remembered she used to say. 

“Old bones, young man,” she said, startling him with the vividness of her voice. It was more than he remembered, more wry than complaintive. “They weren’t meant to bend and fetch papers. Thank you.” 

It was so startlingly reminiscent he could only nod. In his memory, she’d only ever complained about old bones. This was sharper, more real, and he understood it more as a woman faced with the inevitability of aging.

A boy no older than he’d been in his bedroom-and wasn’t that difficult to think on for more than a moment-skateboarding down the road. He shook his head as the kid skittered into a crossing without looking. A sedan laid on its horn and breaks squealed in the early morning peace. The boy went on, unharmed.

It was beautifully painful, walking through the dream-world of his childhood, a dream so much more real than it had a right to be. He knew the Millers on the corner would move out in a few years. They’d divorce after Mr. Miller slept with Ms. Jones, his secretary and the wife of the owner of Jones’ Tap up town. The divorce would take Jacob, their son half a continent away. 

He never realized how much he’d grown to look like his father until he was sitting in the little small town diner and the waitress greeted him with a smile. 

“How are you today, Deputy? Escape work long enough to get some lunch?” she asked. She was a pretty thing, Stiles supposed, with her blonde hair and eyes as blue as anything. She was leaning against the table with a little too much familiarity, too much hope and promise, and that...well. His father was still in mourning at this stage in the game, and Melissa McCall had been a saint, waiting as long as she did. 

“I think you have me confused,” Stiles said, quirking an eyebrow at her. She looked at him again and blushed. 

“I’m sorry, sir. You just look a lot like our John Stilinski. Are you new to the area?” Stiles didn’t know if he was proud he looked like his father or sad. There was none of his mother in his face, and it was painful to have lost that. 

“Just passing through,” he said with a smile. His order was as unchanged as it had been since he was five. Cheeseburger. Curly fries. Dr. Pepper. He was a man of habits.

“Where are you from?” she asked, making conversation as she wrote down the order. She had two tables in the entire diner, and Stiles didn’t recognize the pair at the far table. They were both dark haired and bent toward each other. Stiles couldn’t for the life of him place why they looked so familiar. 

“Los Angeles,” he said, the words slipping off of his tongue easily. It had been a long time since he struggled with talking to pretty girls. Lydia broke him of that in his teens, and he hadn’t grown into an unattractive man-See Reference A: she’d just confused him for his father. 

“Wow! The big city!” she said, sliding into the booth across from him. “What do you do there? Are you an actor?” He couldn’t help the snort. 

“I work for a law firm, paralegal.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of himself. “I have some business in town.” He wasn’t sure why he was lying. The dream would end eventually, no matter how long it had gone on now. Any second he would have had enough masochism and pinch himself...any second. 

“Order up!” 

The waitress left him alone to get his order, and he visciously pinched at his forearm. When the world around him stayed intact, he stepped up his game, biting into the fleshy pad of his thumb. 

The tang of blood startled him. 

“Well, this is new,” he muttered. There were worse things, he supposed, than dreaming of home. 

His food was in front of him and gone in a matter of minutes. The check in hand, he paid with a crinkled old fifty, chagrined at the large amount of change that came back. If this dream went on too long, he wasn’t sure how he was going to pay for things. 

“You have a great day, sir!” the waitress called after him. 

Out on the sidewalk, he rolled his eyes. 

_Vapid child. She thinks she’s going to be an actress someday. Someone will see her blonde hair and blue eyes and take her away from her apron. She’ll never leave this shit town unless it’s under a trucker’s-_

Stiles shook himself, startled by the turn of his thoughts. He blinked into the sun, frozen in place. That was a familiar string of consciousness, too terrible to forget. 

This was suddenly a terrible dream.

-Chapter Two: In Another Time-

Derek was used to waking up outdoors. He’d been in the wolf’s skin so long that waking up inside would be more startling. What was odd, was the fact he woke up cold. He glared down at his forearm propped beneath his chin and startled. Pale skin stretched out instead of fur, moving under corded muscle.

“What the hell,” he muttered, voice hoarse from lack of use. He pushed himself up onto his knees, hands skimming his naked torso and hips. Leaves and dirt skittered off under his palms. Shakily, he sat back on his legs. It took a moment to take in anything other than his human form. The wolf-normally so in tune with who he was - seemed locked away, caged in his mind. 

A low growl built in his throat, and another echoed his own. His head snapped up toward the noise. A woman stood in front of him, tall and sinewy strong. Her hair was dark, falling around her shoulders in waves. It was her eyes, red and challenging, that stood out. 

Behind her, people shifted, and Derek’s eyes trailed toward the movement. Men and women, at least ten of them, ranged on the lawn between her and a house. It was tall, three stories, and sprawling in front of him. Eyes, gold and blue and some so very human, stared back at him. 

Curious eyes peaked out from behind curtains, and it took those curtains, yellow with little flowers hand embroidered into them, to recognize the Hale house, whole and untouched by flame. The recognition took the fight from his limbs, and he sagged backward, naked in the grass, arms on his upturned knees. 

“Who are you?” his mother’s voice was full of the Alpha power, as if she was trying to get an omega to bow to her will. He felt it shudder through him, but he’d been an Alpha - been an Omega a long time, too. He bit visciously into his bottom lip. 

“Answer.” The voice was painfully familiar. Peter stood just to his mother’s elbow, her left hand. Blue eyes glared down at derek, more of a challenge, a threat, than his words or the growl beneath them. Before Paige, Peter had been the only one in the family with beta-blue eyes. 

Derek flashed his own at his Uncle, annoyed at the challenge. A quiet murmur went up among them, and in an instant, Peter had him pinned to the ground, a clawed hand against his throat. 

“Who are you?” Peter asked, though, as he drew in a breath, his grip went slack. Recognition crossed his face, and he let Derek up a moment later. “Who are you?” The question was lost, confused, and muddied with something like self-depreciation. 

“Peter?” Talia asked. Derek kept himself from looking up at her. This would be too painful when it was ripped away, when he woke from whatever nightmare he’d fallen into. He wouldn’t make it ache more, he decided then. He set his jaw; he would not speak. He would weather the storm of whatever the hell he’d found himself tossed into, but he would bite his own tongue off before he made it hurt more. 

“He smells like Pack,” Peter said, though the recognition on his face was too certain for the vagueness of Pack. Peter studied his jaw, his eyes, but he didn’t give him away further. 

“Pack?” Talia asked, and in a moment, she was in Derek’s space, sniffing at his neck and glaring at him like he was a puzzle.

“He smells like...are you one of Steven’s son?” Talia asked, though even Derek could hear she didn’t believe her own suggestion. Steven was her cousin, and he wouldn’t smell any more like Pack than any other Omega coming through town. 

“Can you speak?” Peter asked. He laid a hand on Derek’s shoulder, warm and comforting. This was the man Derek loved above the rest of his family. He was sane and whole but willing to do what was needed for the good of the Pack. 

Derek just stared at him, but it was that stare, he supposed later, that got him locked in the basement of the Hale house. Locked behind blessed iron, unable to touch his wolf in the one place on Earth he never wanted to be again. 

He could hear the screams of his family in his ears. The smoke was thick in his nose, the burning flesh. When he closed his eyes, the Hale house was collapsing in on itself in the blaze.

“What did I do to fail you?” Peter’s voice startled Derek from his nightmares. The beta stood in front of the cage, jaw slack as he stared down at Derek. It was difficult to stay silent when Peter looked so devastated. “Derek, what did I do?”

No one had called him Derek in so long that it broke something in his chest. The devastation on his favorite Uncle’s face along with his name sent his tongue running away from him. 

“I wasn’t your fault,” he said, because it was true and it was important. Laura was his fault, but Derek couldn’t bring himself to tell him that. 

“How are you…”

“Here?” Derek asked. He shrugged when Peter nodded. “I was the wolf, and then I was here.” 

“You were the wolf?” Peter asked, and Derek shrugged again. The Beta glared down at him, and in a moment, he was sitting next to Derek in the cell. The door was shut behind him. Peter had made a terrible decision, Derek knew. His nose could have been deceived by a spell or scent marking, but there he sat, so close their biceps brushed when they breathed. It was trust, a trust Derek hadn’t known in years, in so long it cracked his voicebox open and the whole of him spilled past his lips. 

“I’ve been a wolf for…” he shook his head, hands splayed up. “I don’t know how long I’ve been a wolf.”

“You become an Alpha,” Peter said, voice almost proud. “You’d have to have been, to have the full shift.” 

“I was, for a while.” Derek stared at his hands. “There was something more important than the power, something I had to pay for.” 

Peter accepted the answer, and they sat in silence for a few long minutes before he lay his hand on Derek’s shoulder. The weight of it, of a friendly gesture, a warm touch, was almost damning. 

“Why aren’t you with the Pack?” Peter asked, stiff and still, like he already knew the answer. 

“The Pack is gone. Both of my Packs are gone,” Derek admitted. Peter’s entire spine slumped with such defeat Derek had to speak again. “They’re not your fault either. They’re mine.” 

“How…” Peter couldn’t finish the thought, but he didn’t have to. 

The basement door slid open, and Derek knew the smell that came down the stairs intimately. He should have - it was his own. He raged against the cage, snarling in self-loathing anger. 

The boy was all of sixteen with wide, startled eyes. He was just a kid, really, with wide startled eyes, but even across the distance, Derek could smell a sweet, cloying perfume, and beneath that, wolfsbane.

“Derek!” Peter shouted from beside him, banding a strong arm across his chest to pull him backward. “Stop it!”

“I’ll kill you!” Derek raged. Now that words had spilled forward, it was impossible to keep them inside. “I swear, I’ll rip your throat out before you let her kill them, before you let her destroy everything you stupid, selfish son of a -”

Peter’s elbow connected hard with the side of his head, and he was unconscious before he could finish the slur.


	3. Come What May

Peter Hale was not a good man. His eyes were blue in the mirror, and his past dripped blood with each step. 

He was a loyal man. He’d earned his blue eyes, and he was proud of what they meant - he’d defended what was his and showered in their blood. 

Derek had always been a proud kid, someone confident in everything they did. He was too mature for his years, but Peter loved that about him. Derek was, Peter thought, his replacement. The thought had always been to keep fighting longer, pushing through more pain than he thought possible. 

Because failure? Failure meant Derek would have to take up the left hand mantle, and Peter wasn’t willing to let that happen just yet. 

And then there had been his nephew, spilling hate and giving him just enough to know there was something wrong with his nephew - the one that smiled and gave the younger ones piggy-back rides. That nephew was going to be alone, was going to grow into a man Peter was proud of, even if he’d only known him for a handful of hours. 

But he was alone, and he hated himself so much he was willing to end his own life instead of fixing what he’d done wrong. So, Peter did what he was good at.

He handled it. 

Derek - the Derek with a family - was a promising wolf, but he didn’t have a full grasp on his senses, still missed scents on the wind and let his nose become overpowered by perfume and flowers. 

Peter didn’t.

The woman was beautiful with a confident, knowing smile and soft curves barely hidden beneath his clothes. She gave Derek soft smiles while her eyes stayed hard as flint. 

Peter followed her, and as he climbed through her bedroom window, the smell of wolfsbane and hunter stung his nose. She slept, peacefully, for only a handful of seconds before he saw red. 

Blood ran in arcs across a cream bedroom wall. It dripped down in long, lingering lines, sluiced off his face and arm, staining the pale carpet. She’d never even woke before she died. 

He stared down at her on the bed. He could see why his nephew had gotten distracted. What he couldn’t was how Peter himself had missed it the first time. How he hadn’t scented wolf’s bane beneath the smell of her perfume.

No matter what the haunted, grown version of his nephew said, those blue eyes, the loss of the Pack, was his fault. In the end, it wouldn’t matter, because Peter had done what he was good at.

-Chapter Three: Come What May-

Talia Hale was not, contrary to her teenage children’s opinions, an idiot. She hadn’t placed the scent on the stranger immediately, not really, but as he slept in the cage in her basement, she got a better smell.

“He’s alone,” Peter said from behind her. She hadn’t heard him come in the back tunnels, but she’s smelled the blood and bleach. 

“This is going to Derek,” Talia said. Peter stepped up beside her. 

“This was going to be Derek,” Peter amended. “Not anymore.” 

“Is there going to be fallout?” Talia asked, turning toward him. 

“No,” he said. “I’m nothing if not thorough.” 

“I’d prefer you were careful.” She sighed and left him in the basement. She had a son that would be heartbroken by the morning, two daughters on the verge of some great ruination of their teenage years, and a house full of cousins and nieces and nephews that would need to be guided through the next few days.

-Chapter Three: Come What May-

Derek couldn’t stand looking at himself, a few paces off, locked in one of the full moon cages. The wolf part of his family was kept down there, among the cells for the safety of the town during the full moon.

He could smell the smug satisfaction even from such a distance, and it turned his stomach. Derek didn’t know when he was, what full moon it was, and the panic made his eyes seek out Peter. 

Peter, who was tellingly absent. Talia kept looking deeper down the tunnels, waiting to have one of the humans lock the heavy iron gate and leave them to their wolves. She was on edge, even Derek could smell it. 

Peter came through the gate, shoulders lax, a grim smile on his face. The smell of bleach was strong, but blood lingered beneath it. Each set of wolf eyes followed him. Peter scoffed at them and let himself into Derek’s cage. 

“There won’t be a problem,” he said, and like that, Derek felt a weight lift from his shoulders. The faint tell-tale perfume and wolfsbane was hard to pick out under the blood and bleach, but it was there. It was safe. 

“She’s gone?” he whispered, voice pitched low enough so even the wolves’ ears wouldn’t catch it. 

“A few hours ago,” Peter confirmed. “She got blood on my favorite shirt.” 

Derek took satisfaction in the gruesome statement, would have for far longer if the faint smell of burning hadn’t wafted through the floorboards.

Smoke filled the basement slow and cloying. Panic and fear and everything that was wrong in the world rose up in his belly. Cora and Laura were there, in their own cells. He, himself, was staring wide-eyed and asking his mother what was going on. 

He begged the wolf in him, the Alpha in him to rise up and rip the very walls down, but the blessed iron held even the most crazed of wolf. 

His ears could hear the coughing and screaming from above. In the time it took Derek to resign himself to what was happening, he knew reality was so much worse than nightmares.

-Chapter Three: Come What May-

Stiles only remembered the scarf after he’s staring out from a jail cell. One minute, he was walking down the sidewalk, absorbing as much of the good his dream was willing to give him before the Nogitsune whispered at the back of his mind. In the next, he was bowled over by a half-size version of himself.

The scarf, pale cream, is balled in the boy’s hand, as he stumbles but keeps running. The scent would be long gone, and Stiles remembers being disappointed it was missing by the time he’d stolen it. 

He can’t even be angry with himself as the shopkeeper runs out into the street.

“Hey!” the man shouted, and it took Stiles a few seconds to figure out the man was talking to him. “You’re with that hoodlum?” he asked, voice full of indignation. 

“In a manner of speaking,” Stiles said, kicking himself in the next moment. 

_Stepped into it again, didn’t you? No wonder they all left you. You don’t know how to speak, let alone do anything-_

“Shut up,” he muttered, just loud enough for the shopkeeper to hear. An hour later, he was stumbling his way through an explanation about how he wasn’t responsible because some kid stole from a thrift store while he was there.

Stiles ran his hands through his hair, stomach trying to decide between anger and nervousness and anxiousness. The door slipped open, and he leaned heavily on the table in front of him, ready to give another speech to whoever walked through-

“Dad,” he muttered. John paused in the doorway, confusion on his face. “Sorry,” Stiles said. “I just...remembered I forgot to tell my dad I’d made it as far as Beacon Hills.” 

“I’m sure he’ll be proud to hear his son made it to town and participated in petty theft.” 

_Ouch. He doesn’t even like you as an adult. We could kill him, you know. You just need to open up that little spark of yours, and I could let you-_

“I like to think he’d be proud of me for a lot of things,” Stiles said, eyes following his father as he sat down at the table across from him. 

“Like traveling without identification?” John asked. 

Of course he didn’t have ID. The only form he might have had belonged to a seven or eight year old boy. Stiles had dropped his ID’s and credit cards into a drainage grate the second he realized this dream was more realistic than he’d like to admit. 

“What can I say?” Stiles asked, a smile in place. “I’m a man of mystery.” 

“Mystery is going to land you in jail overnight. Tell me who you are, what you’re doing here, and I can get Mr. Schmitz to drop the charges.” 

“Look,” Stiles said, drawing up his best impression of the defence attorney he’d worked with. “You’ve taken a guy some kid knocked over on the sidewalk and held him without evidence. If I’m not free to leave, then charge me.” 

There were easier ways to try to get out of the situation. He could lie. He’d always been good a lying to his father. He could say he was an illegal Polish immigrant. He’d done it before, when he was leaving the supernatural world behind and wanted no one to be able to find him. He could pull enough Polish out of his ass from the years his mother spoke it to pass, and he’d most likely be on his way. 

Except, being on his way meant he had no reason to see his father. And that? Well, that was a heavy thing. 

“If you can’t tell me your name and what you’re doing here, I’m well within the law to keep your overnight,” John warned. 

“Three hots and a cot and all that?” Stiles asked, a shit-eating grin in place. He shrugged and watched as John stood from the chair outside his cell. 

Stiles had spent a night or two in this very cell in the past. Once, when he was young, they’d taken Scott’s mom’s car joyriding. John and Melissa thought it best they cool their heels in the jail for the night.

This time around, the cell wasn’t as scary. The hush of empty cells was a comfort, and Stiles spent more time sleeping than anything else until a call came over the radio.

“Situation up at the Hale preserve.” The voice over the radio sounded on edge, worried, and it made Stiles sit upright. He hadn’t considered the Hale family when he’d woken up in this limbo. 

“What’s up?” John asked, sounding so young Stiles had to smile. 

“Someone said the Argents tore out of town half an hour ago loaded for war. They picked up quite a bit of gasoline on their way.” 

Surely it wasn’t time for the Hale fire? He ran the math and swore under his breath.

_You going to lay here and listen to them talk about the worst fire in the history of the county? You’re going to listen as all those people die instead of-_

“Let me out of here!” he shouted, arms banging against the bars. “Let me out!” No one answered, and he faintly heard the front door shut and lock. “Shit,” he said, pacing. He ran shaking hands through his hair. “Alright,” he muttered. “Alright, let’s do this.”

His spark had always been limited before the Nogitsune. It had taken the power and ran with it, and if he tried, he could just remember the rush of -

The lock clicked, and the old cell door slid open.

_That’s the door, Stiles. Do you remember opening the door? He ignored the whisper in his mind, hearing it clearly now that he knew what to listen to. He was older though, he told himself, he was stronger and he knew how to close the door._

He stole the spare keys of a cruiser and was tearing down the old road to the Hale house in a matter of minutes. Flashing lights sent a cascade of light over the normally murky woods, and he wondered for a moment, why there were no other cars. 

The house was burning when he rounded the last bend in the lane. Flame licked up the side of the building, swallowing entire doors, blowing windows out with the heat. The shrill call of a fire engine was a faint whisper on the wind over the roaring flame. 

_You came this far just to watch them die?_

“Fuck that,” Stiles said, bringing his hand up to reach toward the house. 

In his memory, he knew the darkened yard was lined with mountain ash, knew the house itself was circled as well. Something rushed through him as he stepped forward, something dark and menacing and cloying into every molecule of his being. 

It warred with him for a splintered moment. As little more than a child, Stiles had fallen prey to the Nogitsune. He’d been a stranger to dark thoughts and pain and loathing. They were old friends now, and the centuries old creature settled beneath his skin, viper angry and waiting - but obedient.

The mountain ash blew away from the yard and house, and he took the stairs at a run. “Open,” he said. The Nogitsune didn’t stop him, didn’t fight. The door exploded outward, and he startled for a moment as smoke poured out of the ruined frame. 

He nearly tripped over the first body he found. It was a girl, young and tiny, curled up on the ground. He picked her up by her waist and tucked her beneath his arm. There was another, this one younger yet, no more than three or four paces off. He had that one up and the pair of them out the door in seconds.

He checked their pulses, lightning quick, before running back into the house. With the smoke having a way to escape, there were a few adults coming to slowly on the ground, coughing into the blistering heat. 

“Get everyone out!” Stiles shouted to the first that pushed themselves up onto hands and knees. He laid a hand on the man’s back, shaking him firmly and helping him to his feet. The man’s eyes were wide and terror stricken. Stiles almost swallowed his tongue. 

This could be no one but Derek Hale’s father or an older brother he never spoke about.

The man nodded, dragging people out of the house by their arms as Stiles helped another stumble to her feet. She went, coughing and sputtering, but helping a pair of small, crying children.

“Where are the wolves?” Stiles asked the next. The young woman nearly growled at him. “You want them to die in the basement?” he asked. “I just need you to point out the door.” 

Her eyes flickered sideways down a hall, and Stiles took as much of a hint as he was going to get. There was a door at the end of it, a wall of licking flame engulfing it. He could hear the foundation crackling under the weight of the burning building.

“Stop!” he shouted at it, but the dancing wall of flame didn’t so much as flicker. He lunged toward the door despite the fire, hitting it with his shoulder and falling through. He rolled down the stairs below, each step digging into delicate flesh. 

The wind left him in a rush as he collapsed to the ground. Dazed, he patted at his burning shoulder. 

“Here!” a woman shouted, and Stiles blinked up at Alpha-red eyes. He groaned, forced himself to his feet, and grabbed a set of iron keys from a nail. She took them from his shaking fingers and pointed toward another set further down the narrow basement.

The wolves prowled their cells, some of them flashing their golden eyes at him as he fumbled the keys, head swimming from the fall and the smoke. H

“Stiles?” He heard a faint, confused voice call his name, and he squinted through the smoke. Derek Hale was in front of the door in an instant, his hands going through the bars and guiding Stiles’ to the lock. The door snicked open, and Derek pushed past, taking the key ring and moving down the line. 

Peter of all people stepped out behind Derek. He hefted Stiles up off his feet in a bear hug, a wicked smile on his lips. He sat Stiles down after a moment and started dragging some of the wolves toward the stairs. Stiles stood in the middle, coughing in the smoke. 

“Stiles,” Derek said, standing in front of the last vacant cell. There was soot on his face and his hands where he had been digging at the window behind him, barred with something that had his knuckles blistered and bleeding. He stared sightlessly forward despite Talia’s command to run. 

“Come on, big guy,” Stiles said, pushing a hand between his shoulder blades and steering the wolf toward his mother, a woman that eyed the pair of them with grateful curiosity muddied by rage. Stiles hoped that anger would wait for the Argent family. 

Outside, the Hales stood and sat in groups, tending to those that were injured. The rest watched their home burn. Stiles had never known that pain, but he had watched his family fall apart. He would have rather torn his own childhood house apart by hand than watch his family shatter again.

The fire truck came up the long Hale drive as Stiles and Derek stepped off the bottom step. The windows had all shattered, the entire left side of the home collapsed in on itself from the roof to the second story. 

Sirens followed the truck up, and Stiles ducked into the Hale family as his father ran from his cruiser, eyes wide with panic until he took in the family on the lawn, shielding each other against the world. 

Stiles could see a few missing faces, chief among them the younger wolves, who he was sure would be running the woods. Derek made a strangled noise in the back of his throat and had the presence of mind to slip back around the house through the smoke. 

Stiles followed, unwilling to find himself behind bars again so quickly. 

The preserve behind the house was dead silent, smoke wafting through the trees and making the moonlight shimmer. Derek was lost, more lost than Stiles had ever seen him. The wolf stumbled blindly, steps too big, too clumsy. When he finally stopped walking, he collapsed to his knees in the moss covered ground. 

When Stiles crouched down in front of him, Derek was smiling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's the end of The Green Witch - Part One. There may be more short little fics like this in this series, because it opens a door to all sorts of angst and cuteness that I may or may not write. If you have a request in this arc feel free to drop a line.


End file.
